The Big Breach (2 page)

With one flick, the Zippo's flame ignited the touchpaper. I watched for a moment, ensuring it was fizzling soundly, and scampered. There was just enough time to reach the cover of a fallen elm trunk before the device blew with a resounding bang that was much louder than expected. A family of ducks quacked away from the cover of some reeds on the muddy bank and the cooing of the wood pigeons abruptly halted.

Gingerly, just as the echo rolled back from the fellsides of the valley, I emerged from my cover to inspect the damage. The dust was still settling, but the bridge was standing. I smiled with excitement. It was easily my best bang of the summer - jolly good fun for a 13-year-old. I set off for home at the double, hoping the grumpy postmaster wouldn't collar me as I passed his house.

Father was from a Lancashire farming family and met my mother while studying agriculture at Newcastle University. In 1962 they emigrated to New Zealand with their son, Matthew, who was then less than a year old. Father got a job with the New Zealand Ministry of Agriculture as a farm adviser in Hamilton, North Island. I was born in 1963 shortly after their arrival; then in 1964 came Jonathan, my younger brother. New Zealand was an idyllic place to bring up a young family - good climate, peaceful, plenty of space - and Father wanted to stay, but my mother wanted us to be educated in England.

On our return in 1968 my father found work as an agricultural adviser in what was then called the county of Cumberland. My parents started house hunting in the area and discovered an old coachhouse that they both liked in a village a few miles north of Penrith. The house was not very large and was in a ramshackle condition, but it had a big garden containing some spacious outbuildings. My mother liked the large garden that would give her three young sons plenty of room to play. My father was keen on DIY and building, and saw plenty of scope for improvement. They scraped together the money they had and mortgaged themselves to the hilt to buy it and we moved in shortly after my fifth birthday. My mother started work as a biology teacher in a comprehensive school in the market town of Penrith.

At first my brothers and I attended local primary schools, but my parents wanted a better education for us than that provided by the secondary schools in the area. Matthew, being the eldest, sat the entrance exams for nearby private schools and won a scholarship to Barnard Castle, an independent boarding school near Durham in north-east England. He started there in 1972 and I followed the year after, also with a scholarship, then Jonathan two years later. Despite free tuition, it was still a considerable financial sacrifice for my parents to pay the school fees every year. It must have been quite an emotional sacrifice for them too, because we all hated the place.

Barnard Castle school was very sport-oriented, particularly towards rugby. I scraped into the school rugby and swimming teams a few times as a junior, but lost interest in later years. The disciplined regime of boarding school was unpleasant. Life was dictated by bells - bells for lessons, meals, prep, bedtime, lights-out and chapel. There were a few good times there, but my strongest memories are of being cold, hungry and slightly bored. The daily chapel services - twice on Sundays - were especially tedious.

The holidays made school bearable, particularly the long summer break. The River Eden ran through the village and many hours were spent with the local boys on the bridge, carving our initials into the parapet and pulling wheelies on our bikes. In the summer we spent long afternoons in the river, swimming and shooting the rapids on old inner tubes. Everything mechanical interested me and many happy hours were spent tinkering in my father's workshop in the big barn next to our house, fiddling with his tools and getting filthy dirty. With my father, I built a go-kart from bits of scrap-metal and an old Briggs & Stratton bail-elevator engine rescued from a nearby farmyard, and used it to tear up my mother's lawn. The go-kart was joined by an old Lambretta scooter, also immediately pulled to bits and rebuilt. There wasn't enough room in the garden to get it beyond third gear, so when my parents were out one day, I took it out on to the village road to see how fast it would go. I nearly crashed it into the grumpy postmaster's car and had to endure years of grudges from him.

Returning to boarding school at the end of the holidays was grim. Unlike my brothers, who both left after O-levels to study at the local comprehensive school, I stuck it out for A-levels. The school didn't much cater for my interests and I was often in trouble for seeking stimulation from unapproved activities. We had a cheerfully irresponsible A-level chemistry teacher, Mr Chadwick, who one organic chemistry lesson demonstrated the stupefying effect of ether by gassing one of my classmates, Villiers, leaving him passed out on the floor of the laboratories. Chadwick turned a blind eye while we stole bottles of the chemical from the labs afterwards and got high sniffing it in the school grounds. He also taught us how to make explosives, whose effects he gleefully demonstrated by blowing up bombs behind the biology labs. Villiers and I stole the ingredients to make our own bombs in the sixth form kitchens. Once we made mercury fulminate, an unstable explosive which involved reacting deadly poisonous mercury and cyanide. We boiled them up in an old saucepan which, to our delight, the school jock used afterwards to make himself scrambled eggs. I bumped into him many years later in London, so it presumably didn't do him permanent harm.

Though school was not always fun, I worked hard and won a scholarship to study engineering at Cambridge University. The gap year was spent working in South Africa for De Beers in a job arranged by my father's brother, a research scientist at the diamond mining and manufacturing firm. The bright blue skies, open spaces of the high veldt, good food and wine were a refreshing contrast to Barnard Castle. One of the prerequisites to study engineering at Cambridge was to learn workshop skills, so the first few months at De Beers were spent learning to lathe, mill and weld. Then the firm gave me a fun project.

Diamonds are created in nature by the intense pressure and temperature deep in the earth's crust metamorphosing raw carbon into diamonds. De Beers theorised that diamonds could be created artificially by the intense but instantaneous temperatures and pressures created in an explosion, and they asked me to investigate. Several happy months were spent designing and making increasingly large bombs of plastic explosive, packed around a core of ground carbon. With the help of demolition experts from the South African Defence Force, we detonated them on ranges just outside Johannesburg, making some huge explosions. It was possible that we managed to make a few diamonds, but we never managed to find them in the huge craters left by the bombs.

It was a wrench to leave that job in the summer of 1981, but I was looking forward to starting at Cambridge.

2. CULTIVATION

FRIDAY, 8 JUNE 1984

GONVILLE & CAIUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

A
sweltering May week was drawing to a close and the rounds of drunken garden parties that undergraduates organised to celebrate the end of final exams were winding down. My engineering tutor had just told me at the Caius College garden party that the faculty had awarded me first class honours in my aeronautical engineering final exams. Too much Pimms and the evening sun slanting into Gonville court were making me drowsy as I returned to my rooms.

`Tomlinson?' an unfamiliar voice called from behind. `You're Tomlinson, aren't you?' I turned round to see Dr Christopher Pilchard, a tutor in law, leaning out of the open window of his ground-floor study. His face was familiar, but having never met him it was surprising that he knew my name. He was notorious in the college because of his ginger wig, the result of a bicycle accident many years earlier which had caused all his hair to fall out. Slightly tipsy, it was difficult to resist casually examining his hairline for signs of it as he spoke. `Tomlinson, have you thought about what you're going to do with yourself after you leave?'

`Yes, sir,' I replied cautiously, wondering why he should be interested.

`I'm joining the navy, the fleet air arm.'

Pilchard snorted dismissively, as if he didn't approve of the military. `Listen, Tomlinson, if you ever change your mind, but would like to try your hand at another form of government service, then let me know.' With that he ducked back into his study, taking care not to catch his wig on the lip of the window sash.

Continuing on to my rooms, it felt flattering to have been approached. For it had been a discreet invitation to join the British Secret Intelligence Service, more commonly referred to by its old wartime name, MI6. Every Oxford and Cambridge college and leading British university has a `talent spotter' like Pilchard, a don sympathetic to MI6 who looks out for suitable recruits. The majority of MI6 recruits come this way from the two most prestigious universities in Britain, though it is not foolproof - Philby, Maclean and Burgess were all recruited into MI6 the same way.

Pilchard's approach was flattering but, climbing the creaky wooden stairs to my digs at the top of D staircase, I decided not to pursue the offer - for the moment at least. Having read a few John Le Carr‚ novels, I reckoned the job seemed stuffy and desk-bound. Nor did I identify much with the other undergraduates whom Pilchard had approached - conservative, establishment arts students who spent most of their days lolling around drunk in the college bar. For them, getting a tap on the shoulder from Pilchard was a rite of passage, a sign that they had made their mark on college life. If that was the sort of person MI6 wanted then it wasn't the right career for me.

Inspired by the books I had read in my spare time at Cambridge, I wanted a career that offered travel and adventure: Wilfred Thesiger, the desert explorer who crossed the Arabian `empty quarter' when only in his early 20s; Sir Francis Chichester, who single-handedly circumnavigated the world by sail and almost by light aircraft; Antoine de St Exup‚ry, the French pioneer aviator whose semiautobiographical novel
Vol de Nuit
, set in pre-war Argentina, I had so greatly enjoyed; Captain Oates, a former member of the college, who selflessly sacrificed himself on Scott's 1914 Antarctic expedition and whose flag was displayed in the college dining-hall, reminding us of his exploits every evening. It seemed to me that the best way to lead an adventurous life like these role-models, and in a structured and secure career, was to join the armed services, and the navy appealed to me the most.

Pilchard's suggestion, however, was intriguing. Lying back on my narrow bed in the garret room, the evening light slanting in through the open window, I wondered what had marked me out amongst the other undergraduates. On matriculating in the university in 1981, I had been determined to do more than just study. My uncle in South Africa had been a member of the Cambridge University Air Squadron, a flying club sponsored by the Royal Air Force, and he enthused me to join up. The opportunity to learn to fly at the exacting standards of the RAF and even get paid a small stipend was an opportunity too good to miss. The Air Squadron became the focal point of my extracurricular and social activities at the university. We learned to fly in the Bulldog, a robust dual-seat training aircraft. My instructor, Flight Lieutenant Stan Witchall, then one of the oldest still-active officers in the RAF, had been a young Hurricane pilot in the Battle of Britain. Twice a week I bunked out of engineering lectures and cycled up to Marshall's airfield, seven kilometres from the centre of Cambridge, for flying lessons.

Scuba-diving was another activity which enthused me, inspired by the films of Jacques Cousteau. After I had qualified with the university club, Easter holidays were spent in Cornwall diving on the wrecks and reefs of the murky, cold Channel waters, then getting drunk in the evenings on the strong local brews of the old fishing and smuggling villages. It was nothing like the paradises portrayed in Cousteau's films, but was still exhilarating.

The summer holidays of 1982 were spent travelling around Europe on a rail-pass that allowed unlimited travel for a flat fee. My budget was tiny, so nights were spent sleeping on trains and the days sightseeing. Thousands of miles of slumber got me as far afield as Morocco and Turkey. The experience gave me the travel bug, enthusing me to go further afield.

The next year a vacation job in a local bakery yielded enough savings for a trip to the Far East. Two months were spent backpacking around Thailand and Malaysia on a shoestring budget. My return flight was with Aeroflot, the cheapest ticket available, and a brief refuelling stop was scheduled in Moscow. But it was the day after a Russian Air Force Mig 17 had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 over the Sakhalin peninsula, killing all 269 persons aboard the Boeing 747. In reprisal, the Western powers had banned all Aeroflot flights from their airways shortly after my plane arrived at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport. Along with the other 200 passengers, I was stranded in Moscow for two days, waiting for a British Airways jet to arrive from London to pick us up. Aeroflot put us up in a cheap hotel near the airport, but refused to unload our hold luggage, leaving us with just hand-luggage and the clothes we'd been wearing on leaving sweltering Bangkok. But inappropriate attire wasn't going to spoil my unexpected opportunity to see Moscow. With an equally inappropriately dressed Australian whom I'd met on the plane, I tramped around in the freezing autumnal rain and fog in T-shirts and flip-flops, to the bemusement of the dour Muscovites.